


Assignment: Asset Mike Howell

by kissoffools



Category: American Ultra (2015)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Falling In Love, Mildly Dubious Consent, Past Brainwashing, Pre-Canon, Undercover Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 05:05:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5444342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kissoffools/pseuds/kissoffools
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years ago, the Ultra program was terminated. Five years ago, she brought Mike Howell to the tiny, podunk town of Liman, West Virgina. Her assignment: spend one month reintegrating him into society. Help him get a job. Don't get too close. Leave at the end of the month.</p><p>She's good at her job. She always completes her assignments. Well... until now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assignment: Asset Mike Howell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tam_Cranver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tam_Cranver/gifts).



> Set five years prior to the events of "American Ultra".

The morning after she brings Asset Mike Howell to Liman, West Virgina, she wakes up in a cold sweat. 

_What the fuck am I doing?_ is like a new mantra pounding over and over in her head, and every one of her nerve endings is screaming at her to roll out of bed, activate her emergency tracker, and get the hell out before Mike wakes up. Each one of her one thousand, seven hundred and forty-six days’ worth of CIA experience is fighting her, telling her to report back to her commanding officer and get her ass back on the next flight to Langley. It doesn’t matter that she’s under orders—that she’s _supposed_ to be off the grid right now to keep her cover. She’s used to regimen, regulation, reporting in every morning. She isn’t used to a podunk town in the middle of nowhere that’ll have her hiding in plain sight. She isn’t an undercover agent; she’s a handler. She keeps her assets in check. She doesn’t take them off the grid and play happy stoner girlfriend.

Her instructions are clear: be the new, fun girlfriend. Be good to him, but don’t get too close. Help him get a job, meet some people, and settle in. Don’t compromise the cover or the program. Leave at the end of the month. Most important of all: don’t let the asset get too attached. Don’t let him fall in love. And don’t, for the love of God, have sex with him. 

She’s good at following orders. She’s good at sitting behind a desk to fill out paperwork, and she’s good at observing assets and reporting her findings back up the chain of command. But this? This assignment is too much, and it makes her throat constrict. Every fiber of her being is telling her to _run._

But then Mike’s arm, toned and slender, flops across her body. When she turns her head, he’s giving her a little half-smile, sleepy and warm, his eyes barely open.

“Hey,” he mumbles, dipping his head down to rest against her shoulder.

And the panic stops. 

One month, she was told. One month—thirty-one days—to get him settled, to make sure any of the procedures he underwent don’t have any dramatic side effects. One month being incommunicado from base, from Agent Lasseter, from her regular life. One month in this sleepy little nowhere town, with this poor guy who doesn’t know he has just had his life changed forever, and then back to base. One month of being Phoebe.

Phoebe, who’s never left her small town, who never graduated from college, who’s content with skating by on mediocrity and enjoys the basics. Phoebe, who is simple. Safe. Boring.

She looks at Mike, still half-asleep beside her. His hair is wild and unruly, his pyjamas are all twisted up, and he has a bit of crust on his cheek. He looks serene. Safe. Totally trusting. 

She can be Phoebe for one month. 

Right?

“Hey,” Phoebe whispers back, shifting a little so that she’s curled towards him. He smiles more and pulls her closer. She rests her head against the warm cotton of his t-shirt.

“I like waking up to you,” he says into her skin. He’s almost a little cute like this, she thinks. 

One month. 

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Me too.”

***

_Your name is Phoebe Larson,_ she repeats to herself in the mirror every morning as she pushes her fingers through her shower-wet hair. _You’ve lived in Liman, West Virgina since you were a kid. You and Mike have known each other since high school. You’ve been together two months and you just moved in together like a couple of crazy teenagers. Your name is Phoebe Larson._

Four days and seven hours of this, and it hasn’t been all bad. The mini morning briefing session helps, and she has to admit, it’s a lot simpler to get dressed in the morning now that she doesn’t have to deal with ironing blouses and matching her shoes to her pantsuit. Phoebe is an easier character to slip into than she’d expected. A job at a motel, some new stoner friends, and spending every night curled up in Mike’s arms. It’s different, but it could certainly be worse.

“Babe?” Mike shuffles into the bathroom and grins at her in the mirror. “Hey, there you are.”

“Our house is eight hundred square feet,” Phoebe says, the corner of her mouth quirking up just a bit. “Where else would I be?”

“Well, you weren’t in my arms, so I knew something just wasn’t right.”

She laughs, groaning in an exaggerated way as he wraps his arms around her waist and rested his chest against her back. “You’re so fucking corny,” she says.

He kisses her neck. “I know, but you laugh like that every time. So it makes me want to keep it up.”

Her smile softens a little, and she leans back into him. “You caught me,” she says. “I think you’re adorable.”

“Knew it.”

She twists around to kiss him, brushing her lips against his gently. “Mmn. You’ve been smoking already? Where are you finding this stuff?”

He raises his eyebrows, and she can feel him still just a little. “I found a guy—he comes into the store. He’s got the coolest van, babe, you’d like him.”

“That’s your bar for making friends? A cool van?”

Mike wilts, and she instantly regrets the snark in her tone. That wasn’t fair. The guy has just, unbeknownst to him, had his entire life changed. He can smoke some damn weed if he wants to. 

“Mikey, I’m sorry—”

“His name is Rose. He dropped off some bud while you were in the shower. My shift isn’t ‘til later, I thought it’d be okay. I’m sorry.”

His voice is uncertain, like he isn’t sure if he’s done something wrong. It’s a far cry from the belligerent criminal they’d taken into the Ultra program, and even further from the over-confident agent she’d watched him transform into over the past few years. He’s a whole new person now, and she can’t help but feel a little pang of guilt at the thought. 

Ultra has completely changed his life without his knowledge. The least she can do now is be good to him while she’s still here. 

“No, babe, it’s totally okay. Don’t apologize, I’m sorry,” she says, softening. She reaches up to brush a piece of hair out of his eyes—it’s already starting to get a little long. “Did you save any for me?”

The smile unfurls across his face again. “Don’t I always?”

When he drops his arms and turns back towards the living room, she gets the thought for the first time. _Maybe we aren’t doing the right thing here, after all._

***

Eight days, ten hours and nine minutes in, and she’s enjoying Mike’s company more and more.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, she thinks. She’d been paired with him because of their similar senses of humor and their similar ways of thinking—it made them a compatible team, Lasseter had assured her. Any team where the asset actually gets along with his handler is a good one.

But this is more than that, she thinks. There’s an ease around Mike that she doesn’t feel in her everyday life. She doesn’t date much, and anyone she does go out with certainly doesn’t last long enough for her to feel like this. In her real life, she keeps to herself—she does her job, she does it well, and that’s all she really cares about. Phoebe, though? Phoebe cares about other things. Phoebe cares about Mike.

It’s getting easier and easier for her to pretend to be Phoebe.

“What’s that?” she asks on that eighth morning. She’s at the stove cooking bacon and Mike is sprawled at the kitchen table, scribbling on a scrap piece of paper.

“Hm?”

“Are you drawing?” She’s surprised. She didn’t know he could draw.

“It’s nothing,” he says, sliding a pizza flyer overtop of the paper.

“No, seriously!” She moves away from her frying pan to stand next to him, gently pushing the flyer out of the way. There are little sketches all over the paper—moons and spaceships and asteroids, with a little monkey with a space helmet in the middle. 

“That’s Apollo Ape,” Mike says quietly. His cheeks are pink. “I doodle sometimes.”

“Mike, this is good.”

He looks up at her, his eyebrows raised. “Yeah?”

“This is really good.” She picks it up to look closer. “Seriously. You should draw more like this.”

The way the smile slowly curls across his face, as if he can’t help it, makes something inside her melt. Interesting.

“Thanks, Pheebs.” He takes the drawing back from her to examine, and then raises his head sharply, sniffing the air. “Is that—?”

“Shit!” The bacon is cracking loudly, edges beginning to char and smoke starting to gather above the pan. She dives for it, knocking it off the hot element. “Aw, man, I fucked up breakfast.”

Mike laughs. He gets to his feet, surveying the half-burnt bacon. “Nah. I’ll still eat that.”

“Yeah?”

“Course I will.” He leans in and drops a quick kiss on her cheek. “You made it for me, after all.”

She’s starting to think that sometimes, she might not be pretending at all.

***

“Babe,” she giggles breathlessly. “Babe, I can’t feel my ears.”

“Can you ever feel your ears?”

A pause. “Good point.”

His hand reaches up to brush her hair back, his thumb poking playfully at her earlobe. “Don’t worry. They’re still there.”

Two weeks and four days later, and she’s still there, too. She isn’t missing the rush and adrenaline from the CIA, she’s finding—it’s getting easier and easier every day to relax. It’s Mike, she knows. He’s why it’s easy. He makes for good company, and he’s so intelligent under that haze of smoke and man-made apathy. He makes observations sometimes, comments so astute and insightful that they take her breath away. 

More and more, she’s finding it easy to think of herself as Phoebe. To not have to repeat her facts in the mirror in the morning, because she’s living them without a second thought. Around Mike, she’s starting to _want_ to be Phoebe.

“Phoebe?”

“Yeah, Mike?”

“What do you wanna be when you grow up?”

She snorts and leans back against the front of the couch. They’re sitting on the floor of their dim living room, again, passing a bowl back and forth. “I hate to break it to you, babe, but I think we already hit ‘grown up’.”

He shakes his head. “No, I mean it,” he says. “Like, this is amazing and I’m all fucking about it, but like… don’t you ever think maybe you want something more?”

“Something more?” she asks. All of a sudden, the high vanishes. _Does he know? Is the programming glitching?_ She playfully pokes him in the ribs, half-checking to confirm he’s still feeling normal. The physical is affected just as much as the emotional through their procedures, and soreness is one of the first signs of the programming wearing off. “Why would I want something more?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. He seems unaffected by her little finger jab, and she relaxes. It’s fine. “You’re the smartest person I know. You’re just… so much better than this town.” He doesn’t say it, but she can hear it anyway. _So much better than me._ It makes her ache. She wants to wrap her arms around him and pull him against her, trace patterns on his skin and tell him that he’s better than she could ever be.

And she can, she realizes. Because she’s Phoebe. There’s a part of her, somewhere inside, that’s always been Phoebe. And maybe that part of her has always been looking for a Mike.

“I like it right where I am,” she tells him firmly, reaching for him. She tugs him across the carpet and closes the space between them, pressing herself right up against him. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere but here.”

“Yeah?” he asks quietly.

“Yeah.”

"What about you?" she asks. She knows she shouldn't. Bringing up anything outside the status quo is severely discouraged to prevent wiped memories from surfacing, but she wants to know anyway. "Don't you want something more?"

Mike shrugs, fiddling with the lighter before dropping it on the carpet. "I've got you. You're my something more."

When he turns his face towards hers again, she isn’t surprised. She knows where this is headed—where, she thinks, it might always have been headed. She’d managed to keep any sexual contact to a minimum for the past two weeks, limiting it to kisses and cuddles and the occasional grope or two. She hadn’t wanted to get caught up, to forget her purpose here. Her assignment. She’s always followed orders.

But now, none of that matters. She’s Phoebe. Her old life, the family she barely spoke to, her threadbare apartment and the dates that she barely ever went on—they don't matter anymore. They aren't who she is anymore.

Somehow, now, she really is Phoebe.

It isn’t a thing of beauty. It isn’t like the movies, where the hero leaves the heroine breathless and spent, seeing stars from his every touch. It’s a little messy and Mike is awkward, touching under her shirt carefully like he hasn’t yet gotten used to the fact that he’s allowed to do this. He’s allowed to feel her, and kiss her, and taste her. But he’s attentive and focused, listening to her sounds to guide him, and when he makes her come over his fingers, her head spins a little. He’s warm and solid inside her, and it doesn’t matter that they’re sprawled out on the carpet that she hasn’t seen vacuumed since they arrived or that neither of them bothers to stop and find a condom. It’s perfect, because he makes her _feel_ perfect. With him, she isn’t under scrutiny. She doesn’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations or report back her every move. With Mike, she’s allowed to just _be_. And that’s the most comforting thing of all.

After he comes across her stomach (sure, she isn’t under scrutiny, but she isn’t _stupid_ ), he finds a wet washcloth to clean her up. He wraps his slender arms around her as they both squish onto the couch, limbs at every angle, and she feels him drop a kiss against her shoulder.

“You’re shaking,” he observes quietly, a note of concern in his voice. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

She is, she notices. Here she is, a woman with more life experience than most for her twenty-eight years, trembling in the arms of some guy.

 _Not any guy,_ she thinks. _Mike._

When she puts it like that, it somehow doesn’t seem that strange, after all. 

“I’m totally fine,” she reassures him. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

She’s in so much trouble.

***

The guilt that’s set in over the past five days is starting to swallow her whole.

Phoebe wants to tell him. She wants to admit everything to Mike and apologize for deceiving him, for letting Ultra completely change his life and drop him in this nowhere town. She wants him to know who he is—who he really is—so that he doesn’t have to be afraid anymore. So that he doesn’t feel he always has to say sorry and be scared of life.

But then she looks at him—when he’s trying to cook her dinner without over-seasoning it, when he’s drawing in his notebook, when he’s fast asleep and drooling in bed next to her—and she just can’t do it. He has a whole new life now, and she can’t ruin that.

And she can’t stand the image in her mind of his face falling if she tells him. If he’s going to hate her, the coward in her wants him to do it once she’s long gone.

She’s CIA. She’s been CIA ever since she was twenty-three years old, when she was fresh out of the police academy and her observational skills and attention to detail got her noticed by a recruiter. Being an agent is all she knows, and no matter how good these past few weeks have been—no matter how good it’s felt to be Phoebe—she knows it can’t last forever.

She has a job to do. And no matter what happens, she always finishes the job.

***

Six hours before she’s supposed to call Langley for a pick-up, while she’s trying hard to ignore the churning guilt in her stomach, Mike brings home flowers.

“Get dressed,” he tells her, handing the daisies to her with a goofy little flourish. Clumps of dirt still hang from the stems and it’s pretty obvious that he’s pulled them out of a neighbor’s garden. The guilt mixes with something else in her stomach, and she just doesn’t know what to do with that. “I’m taking you out.”

“What?” she says, raising her eyebrows and feeling her guilt dig a little deeper inside her. “Why?”

“Because it’s our three month anniversary, you look totally hot in a dress, and I hear there’s a restaurant in Clarksburg with the best damn Italian food you’ll ever have,” he says. “I’ve been saving up. We can splurge and get a whole bottle of wine. Come on, get dressed!”

“Clarksburg?” she repeats.

“Yeah!” Mike grins. “We never really go anywhere, and it’s making me a little stir crazy. Why not?”

She knows all about the programming Ultra performed on him—about the side effects put into play to keep him safe. She knows that trying to leave town might not be a good idea. She knows it’s a risk.

She also knows she shouldn’t do this to him. She should make up an excuse, fake sick or do _something_ so that it won’t look like she’s up and leaving him the night after he takes her to some fancy restaurant. Hell, she _should_ tell him the truth. Let him know what’s happened, why she has to leave. At least that way, his inevitable broken heart might not take quite so long to mend. At least then she won’t be a damn coward anymore.

But one look at that excited glow in his eyes squashes all of that. She can’t say no—not when he’s this thrilled to do something so sweet for her. 

If Mike is only going to have a girlfriend for one more night, she’s going to make it a good one.

“Ten minutes,” she tells him, hopping up off the couch. “Just let me make myself all sexy for you.”

“You already are.”

She steals a quick kiss as she moves past him.

Everything goes swimmingly until they’re on the road, about five minutes from the edge of town. They’ve got The Pentagons on the stereo, the windows are rolled down and a warm breeze moves her hair around her shoulders. That gnawing guilt in her gut has quieted, and she’s feeling good.

Until she notices that Mike’s knuckles are white. 

“Babe?” she says, eyeing the way he’s gripping the steering wheel. This can’t be a good thing. When he doesn’t reply, she leans a little towards him. “Baby? Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he says, his jaw tight. 

“Are you sure?”

“Totally.”

“Bullshit, totally. You never look like this.”

“I just… I feel weird.”

He’s shaking. He isn’t looking at her, his eyes focused firmly on the road in front of him, but she can tell he’s a mess. His whole body is trembling like a leaf. He’s gone white. 

The programming is kicking in. He _can’t_ leave town. She can't watch this happen to him.

“Babe,” she says firmly, “pull over.”

“No, it’s—I can do it—”

“It’s okay, just slow down for a second.”

“N-no, I’ll be okay—”

They’re less than a minute from crossing the town line when he starts to hyperventilate. 

“Pull over! Now!”

When he doesn’t respond, she grabs the steering wheel.

She doesn’t think—she just acts. She needs to get them off the road, get them stopped so that he can come down from his panic attack. He may not know what’s happening, but she does. She’s seen it in the other agents as they dealt with their new programming, and she knows this won’t end well. She needs to get them away from the edge of town and back to the safety of their home again, because it’s so goddamn _unfair_ that they’ve trapped him like this. End his program, fine. Send him to the middle of nowhere, fine. Wipe his memory, fine. But stop him from _ever_ leaving?

She can’t do this anymore. He deserves better than this.

Fortunately, her grabbing the wheel isn’t the life-ending move it very well could have been. The sudden movement helps break the panic and kicks Mike out of freeze mode. He slams on the breaks. They skid just a little on the dirt shoulder of the road, but come to rest safe and sound, clear of any harm.

For a minute, the only thing she can hear is his fast breathing.

“I’m so sorry,” she says finally, voice small in what now feels like a wide expanse between the two of them. 

He holds his head in his hands and slumps towards her. “I can’t,” he tells her, his voice strained. “I can’t take you there, I can’t leave.”

“I know,” she says, wrapping her arms around him. The gearshift is jammed into her thigh and it’s awkward trying to reach him, but she doesn’t care. “It’s okay. I understand.”

“I don’t know what happened to me.”

“I think you had a panic attack, baby,” she says gently. God, she hates them. She hates Lasseter and the whole team for doing this to him. She hates _herself_. “You’re okay now.”

“I wanted to take you there,” he told her. “I wanted to so bad.”

She holds him until his breathing stills and he stops shaking. Her hand runs through his hair, trying to ground him. When he finally speaks again, his voice is much more even than before.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not mad, baby."

“But I am,” he insists. “You should be able to go to nice restaurants and not be stuck in the middle of nowhere with a boyfriend who freaks out that easily. I don’t want to hold you back. You should have more than that.”

“Shh,” she says soothingly. “Stop that. I have you—that’s what I want. You aren’t holding me back.” 

None of those words are a lie.

“I’m sorry.” His voice is sad. “I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, babe. It’s okay.” She runs her hand through his hair again. “Everyone gets scared sometimes.”

There’s a pause, a little moment when something electric passes between them, and then—

“I love you,” he murmurs.

She isn’t prepared for the catch in her throat. She isn’t prepared for her heartbeat to pick up and the guilt churning in her stomach to bring tears to her eyes. She isn’t prepared for him to say those words to her, here, on the side of the road in some podunk town in the middle of nowhere.

She’s never been prepared for him.

“I love you, too,” she whispers back. And she isn't lying. She hasn't been lying to anyone but herself for days now.

***

At midnight, after Mike smokes a bowl and passes out with his legs tangled up in the bedsheets, she steps quietly out into the backyard. Pulling out the cell phone she’s kept secret and de-activated for the past month, she sits on the edge of the back deck, knees drawn up to her chest. Then, she dials.

It takes only one ring for the call to connect. “This is Agent Lasseter.”

“Agent Beckett, reporting in,” she says. Her real name feels weird on her tongue. She has to swallow to help her dry, aching throat. “The reintroduction mission has been successful. The asset has no awareness of his previous life or identity, and presents no danger to the program or to anyone around him.”

She can hear Agent Lasseter’s smile through the phone.

“Well done, Agent,” she says. “A car will be there for you in half an hour and we’ll get you into Debrief at once.”

“There’s no need.”

Silence. Then, “Excuse me?”

She steels herself, pressing her lips together for a moment. “There’s no need for a car. I won’t be returning to Langley.” 

“I beg your pardon?”

“This is my resignation. Effective immediately.”

When Lasseter speaks again, her tone is hard. “A car will be picking you up in half an hour, Agent Beckett. You’ll receive your next assignment immediately upon arrival.”

“No, I won’t,” she says. “I’m not coming back.”

“I wouldn’t say that’s your decision to make, Agent.”

“Oh, I would,” she shoots back. “So I really wouldn’t recommend sending that car. Not unless you want Mike to remember exactly who he used to be… and what he’s capable of doing.”

“Agent Beckett—”

“Terminate my files. Permanently.” 

And she hangs up. 

It takes mere seconds to de-activate the phone once again. It doesn’t take her long to bury both it and her emergency tracker in the piss-poor excuse they have for a garden. As soon as she pats the last bit of dirt down on top of her electronics, she feels lighter. More free. 

When she slips into bed next to Mike, he stirs.

“Babe?” he mumbles, reaching for her.

“Hey, babe.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Just the bathroom,” she tells him. “I’m back now.”

“’Kay,” he murmurs, wrapping himself around her. “Don’t go anywhere else. You’re cold. C’mere, I’ll warm you up.”

She presses a kiss to his forehead. “Don’t worry,” she says softly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She is Phoebe Larson, now. She lives in Liman, West Virgina. She and Mike have been together three months and they just said, “I love you”. Her name is Phoebe Larson.

And she finally, _finally_ feels like herself.

_end._

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, Tam_Cranver! I was really excited to match to you this Yuletide. I love this crazy, over-the-top movie with this sweet pairing, and I had a great time exploring Mike and Phoebe's backstory and looking at things from her perspective. I hope you enjoy what I've put together for you. Happy holidays!
> 
> Huge thanks to my wonderful beta - this story wouldn't have wound up where it is without your guidance and thoughts!


End file.
